Religion booknotes

...resistance to identifying mission activity with the expansion of the commercial interests and conquistador mentality...

...Using a species of the theology of correlation, Kopas thinks through the anthropological and spiritual implications of such terms as the "hidden/revealing God" and "creatureliness" and "made in the image of God" and "kinship in creation/' Her strategy is to juxtapose the biblical doctrine of creation, the person of Jesus Christ, and human stories drawn from her own personal experiences and those gleaned from a wide variety of written sources...

...Dear spent his time Peace behind Bars, by John Dear, Sheed & Ward, $14.95,234 pp...

...Valignano insisted on a number of strategies which accounted for the Jesuit successes in the hitherto closed countries of Japan and China: the need for accurate translations of texts to present Christian doctrine in an accessible language...

...The great theoretician of this new missionary strategy was the Italian Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), who was the order's visitor in India and the Far East...

...Those who are not academics might equally appreciate these two volumes as representative of a crucial aspect of the Catholic tradition of sanctity...

...The missionary efforts of these intrepid Jesuits came to ruin in the early eighteenth century with the papal rejection of the Chinese rites-a rejection which anticipated the suppression of the Jesuits themselves...

...As Ross finishes his story he asks a poignant question (it is still very much a question today): "The real issue, it would seem, is why the Riccian vision was rejected by the church...

...No account of the China mission would be complete without reference to the extraordinary achievements of Matteo Ricci, S.J., whose command of mandarin Chinese won him the respect of the learned classes as a sage...

...so good that I've marked passages to read to my students in class...

...If one were to take the Noble/Head volume and combine it with Jo Ann McNamara's Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (1992...

...In fact, it arrived on my desk on a day that I was to speak about Saint Augustine in class, affording me the opportunity to read some excerpts of Possidius's Life of Augustine, antholoSoldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints' Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head, Pennsylvania State University Press, $18.95, 383 pp...

...I have had a long interest in the tradition of hagiography as a resource for understanding how people in various ages appropriate the gospel and, further, how various ages emphasize particular aspects of gospel practice at the expense of others...

...both have residents who get up early, earn very little money, eat nongourmet foods, and survive on routine...

...Monks, however, are there voluntarily while convicts rarely are...

...gized in this volume, to my students...

...It is also new in that his reading is an example of liberation theology in practice...

...Jane Kopas has written an engaging book with an arresting angle: that a deep sense of what it means to be linked to a divine creator provides some thick metaphors concerning personal identity...

...suspicion of attempts to recast the gospel into other thought forms...

...That allows her to link her human metaphors not only vertically to the Creator but horizontally to both human and natural ecologies of dependence and limits...

...and, finally, exertions to insure a native clergy and hierarchy...

...reviewed February 12,1993), which has seventeen female Vitae from the fifth to the seventh centuries, one would have a copious collection of material for an academic course...

...Dear is good enough a writer to give us quick sketches of the other inmates (mostly African-American), the jailers, and the network of supporters who either wrote (Mother Teresa, the father general of the Jesuits), phoned, or visited...

...the same church had already been suppressed in Japan, which closed its borders to all foreigners until the modern period...

...He also brings alive what everyone who ever has visited a prison knows: they are noisy, violent, drab, and awful places to be...

...Ross's elegant two chapters on this singular figure are almost worth the price of the book...

...The result is a lively and readable book which shows how a serious college teacher and theologically reflective writer can bring forth from the ancient pages of Genesis both old things and new...

...At the head of each Vita there is a brief introduction with a particular bibliography of sources...

...Ricci and his fellow Jesuits in China focused their attention on Confucianism...

...There is a very fine introduction which would serve as an entry into the field of hagiography in general and ha-giography in the early medieval period in particular (their time frame ends just before a.d...

...Anyone who takes seriously Karl Rahner's famous observation that we are now becoming a Weltkirche (world church) will read it not only as a record of our fascinating past but as a meditation on our present situation...

...In the concluding chapter of this wonderfully written account of the Jesuit missions to Japan and China, Andrew Ross says that the missionary methods espoused by the Jesuits were so novel (and, we might add, so prescient) that they were a "puzzle that has to be explained...

...they had little appreciation for the Buddhism they encountered in the East which they saw, simply, as idol worship...

...It struck me as I read these pages that Dear's reflections on the Gospel of Mark (the subject of their study until they switched to John late in their days together) makes a very good minicom-mentary...

...Noble/Head also give us lives of important figures in the history of early medieval Europe, such as Boniface (the "Apostle of Germany") and Benedict of Aniane, who was a crucial figure in the development of monasticism...

...in various Carolina jails after he and others banged up some Air Force planes as part of a peace protest...

...My suspicion is that this work origi-nated in a desire to produce a work for classroom use (both editors are history professors...

...Such an exercise is pregnant with possibility as anyone who has ever really thought (as, for example, a Saint Augustine and a Jean Paul Sartre-to cite contrary instances-have done) about what it means to be dependent on and linked to a Creator well understands...

...One cannot read a book like this without thinking of the lessons it teaches for today: lessons about the dangers of too much control from Rome...

...respect for indigenous culture and mores...

...It is fitting, then, that Ricci's dismissal of Buddhism should be redressed in such a respectful way by contemporary Jesuits...

...Dear's journal is powerful spiritual reading and a perfect example of that old monastic practice (lectio divina) of the sapiential reading of the Scriptures...

...As Colman McCarthy says in the foreword: Buy this one, sweet child...

...Some of these Vitae are well known, for example, Sulpicius Severus's "Life of Saint Martin of Tours" which was a "best seller" right down to the Renaissance period and was an important vehicle for spreading the cult of the saint throughout Europe...

...That would explain some of the attractive features built into the volume...

...While in jail, he and his companions (among them Philip Berrigan) wrote letters, read good books, but most of all they engaged in daily Bible study while sustaining themselves on their eucharistic celebrations and periods of prayer...

...Kopas provides her reflections in well-written prose with a quite specific audience in mind: an educated lay audience and/or a college class who may well believe in God but are not quite sure what kind of God it is that they believe in...

...She sees our interdependence with others, creation, and God not by appealing to the faddish tropes of "creation spirituality" but to the more sober realism (she has some good pages on "finitude" and "sin"-no Polly anna she) of the biblical/theological tradition holistically conceived...

...The fruit of that inculturated view of mission resulted in a vigorous Catholic presence in both Japan and China which was later suppressed but a still lively Catholic church in India (Valignano died in Goa...

...Sacred Identity: Exploring a Theology of the Person, by Jane Kopas Paulist, $11.95,217 pp...

...Ross's book (marred, in places, by misprints) is not only an elegant history but a cautionary tale...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...At my leisure I have been reading some other of these Vitae which range from the late patristic period through the Carolingian Age...

...A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in China and Japan, 1542-1742, by Andrew C. Ross, Orbis,$35,216pp...

...Nonetheless, I am profoundly grateful for such people among us as living reproof to the pathetic commitments we make as Christians...

...That is surely not the case today where the interest in Buddhism is high and dialogue with their tradition vigorous...

...Those parallels came to me as I read John Dear's prison diary written in late 1993 and early 1994...

...Dear is a young Jesuit priest with a gift for writing and a deep well of compassion for the poor...

...Like the householder in the Gospel, Dear has brought forth old things and new...

...The very reality of being in jail forces someone like Dear to reflect constantly on why he is there and what "good" being there might accomplish...

...To be professionally interested in the lives of saints is to be interested in an area where there is a flood of publication from historians, theologians, and religionists...

...Was it in the end because Western Christianity was so inextricably linked to European culture that it could not shake itself free from the identification of Christianity with European culture with no remainder...

...I found this recent volume edited by Thomas Noble and Thomas Head a welcome addition to the literature...

...By the end of the eighteenth century Christianity was a small sectarian movement bereft of influence in China...

...Not only do I not possess that grace but am fearful to ask for it (the most dangerous prayers are the ones that God answers) because I do not know if I could live with the seeming doubts, paradoxes, and hardships that such a grace might bring...

...1000...

...From the brief synopsis given above it should not be thought that Kopas reflects on a narrowly vertical axis (that is, "myself and God...

...At the end of the volume there is a bibliographical essay surveying standard works in the field...

...Like John Paul II, Kopas understands that the full context of the Genesis creation account(s) demands that human beings be seen in the context of place and in the context of community...

...I have always felt that being a pacifist, especially a pacifist who is an activist, is a grace given by God...